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THE ADVENTURERS.
What was this Virginia to which they were bound?
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the name stood for a huge stretch of littoral, running southward from lands of long winters and fur-bearing animals to lands of the canebrake, the fig, the magnolia, the chameleon, and the mockingbird.

The world had been circumnavigated; Drake had passed up the western coast--and yet cartographers, the learned, and those who took the word from the learned, strangely visualized the North American mainland as narrow indeed.

Apparently, they conceived it as a kind of extended Central America.

The huge rivers puzzled them.